a new website

Software darktable
#1

A new year is coming on us quickly, so how about a nice new website to go with it?

Baby New Year from 110 years ago …

houz and I have been working hard over the past few months to migrate the old website from Wordpress to a new static site, using Python/Pelican. This should make things more secure and safer for both you and us (see the problems that rawsamples.ch had for the perils of using a db-driven backend for a website). Not to mention it makes collaboration and contributing a bit easier now, as the entire site gets it’s own GitHub repository (I’ll be eagerly awaiting your pull requests).

I tried to create a design that had a bit more emphasis on accessibility and readability. The site is fully responsive for screens ranging from a mobile phone to a full desktop. The type is larger and generally given a bit more room to breathe in the page and we tried to highlight images a bit more, as this is a photography-centered project.

This is just one small way for me to contribute and give back to the community in my own way (you should probably not let me near any real code). In fact, this is one of the reasons I started up the community over at PIXLS.US. We needed a community focused specifically on Free Software photography and a way for us to freely share our knowledge and experiences to help everyone, especially across multiple projects.

pixls.us

If you’re not familiar with the community yet, why not?! We’re all photography folks who have a passion for Free Software with the mission:

To provide tutorials, workflows and a showcase for high-quality photography using Free/Open Source Software.

We also happen to have quite a few developers of various types in the community, and as a way to assist projects and contribute back we’ve been working on websites and other community-oriented functionality (like the forums, hosting comments, files, and more). I’d get in trouble if I didn’t mention that we also got raw.pixls.us setup to replace the ailing rawsamples.ch also.

One neat way we’re able to help out even more is by integrating the commenting system here into the forums. It’s how we manage commenting on the main pixls.us website, and we had great success with this approach for the digiKam project when we built them a new website earlier this year. This lets us moderate comments in one place, allows for cross-pollination of knowledge between the projects, and users get to truly own their comments (instead of being monetized and tracked by some third-party commenting system like Disqus).

Happy New Year

Have a look around the new site and please don’t hesitate to point out any problems you may run into! From me, thank you x1000 to the developers for this awesome project.

patdavid ♥’s darktable

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This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.darktable.org/2017/12/a-new-website/
18 Likes
Let's compare: dt vs. RawTherapee
#2

Thank you @patdavid! And if this shows up on the website then comments are working, too. :slight_smile:

5 Likes
#3

Nice to have a new website. Two minor glitches, I wasn’t informed about the new website by my rss feed – probably because it is already dead. For a smooth transition it would have been cool to get a post mentioning that the links will change. And second glitch, the new rss feed links result in an 404. Probably easy to fix. :slight_smile:
Thanks for all your great work, both for the website and dt itself!

1 Like
#4

Excellent. image

#5

I know, there are some minor things that need to be fixed. But first: dt release and Christmas. :slight_smile:

4 Likes
#6

This prioritisation seems fair enough. :slight_smile: thx again for all your work!

#7

Looking great! Kudos to both :+1::+1:

1 Like
#8

Looking good, a big thanks :grinning:

On the resources page, what about a link to Harry Durgins tutorials?
His parametric mask tutorial should be compulsive viewing :grin:

2 Likes
#9

The RSS feeds have been updated to point to the correct place. There are three feeds available:

I don’t recall what the old RSS feed URL was. I’ll see if @houz wants to point a redirect on the server side to the new feed location.

#10

Good work from all the people involved! It is nice to see darktable in new nicer ‘clothes’ :slight_smile:

1 Like
#11

For now I just linked the files to the old locations on the file system level. We can either leave it like that (not my favorite choice), add redirections in nginx (I’d have to ask PolarFox to do that for us) or we can add a stub RSS file to the old locations with a single post each, telling people about the new feed URLs.

#12

I’d think the semantically correct thing to do would be a 301 permanent redirect on the server config for those old urls. We can add it to the config or .htaccess.

#13

I’ll contact @PolarFox next year to add that then.

1 Like
#14

Beautiful new site! I’m not sure, though, whether the dummy/placeholder copy on the front page won’t alienate first-time visitors. Are you planning to replace it with proper copy soon?

Thanks so much for all your great work, and happy new year!!

#15

Which text do you think is placeholder text?

1 Like
#16

I had the same thought as @Matt_Eastwood. Here’s an example on the home page:

powerful

Something about capability - highlight about some big important features! Maybe mention flexibility here (ease of writing new modules).

community

Something about community, mailing list, maybe discuss forum, and the Flickr page? Number of contributors (indicate health of the project and users). Some other metric of vitality of the community (possibly how to get involved)?

The new site has good “bones”…it’s visually attractive. Congratulations!

1 Like
#17

Ah, got it! Thanks

#18

@patdavid: No one likes our silly jokes. :cry:

5 Likes
#19

It’s really nice and modern the new web! Congratulations!

1 Like
#20

Hey! Don’t you try to pin this on me! I am fairly certain one of my launch notes was to fix the front page copy. Pretty sure it was you darktable weanies that pushed that joke. (for the record, I liked the joke. :wink: ).

1 Like